Running Wild

by Susan Andersen

  “You have never been?”

  “No. It is far away and I have no car.” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Finn slide out of the shadows. “But hopefully someday.” She turned to lean her rear against the back of the vehicle and patted the fender next to her hip.

  “Still,” she said, tilting her head to look up as if she didn’t care one way or the other if he joined her, “I bet you don’t have a view in the city that can rival our sky.”

  It was certainly like nothing she had seen for far too many years. Yet as if her first thirteen years in El Tigre had imprinted it in her DNA, it was a sight she’d carried with her wherever she went. Even in the dead of night—or in this case, earliest morning—the sky was a deep midnight blue strewn with a million stars. Many shimmered dimly and looked every bit the hundreds of light-years away that they were. Others burned brightly and seemed close enough to reach up and gather by the fistful.

  Frederico merely shrugged, however, unimpressed. “Give me the bright lights of the city any day,” he said, leaning against the trunk next to her. He turned to give her a smoldering once-over. “I like looking at you, though.”

  She brought a hand up to brush back her hair and maybe buy herself a few moments’ reprieve from the intent she saw building in his expression. Just in time she remembered the elaborate head wrap she’d created to disguise the fact she was a blonde. But the action brought her hand into her line of sight and even in the dim light she was sidetracked by how dirty her index finger had gotten from writing on the trunk. Without thought, she popped it in her mouth and sucked.

  An unfortunate impulse, as it turned out, and one she regretted immediately. But before she could even grimace at the taste, Frederico whipped an arm around her and yanked her first to her feet, then into his arms. Her mouth went slack in surprise and the finger she’d been about to spit out slid free. Then faster than she could catch her breath he slammed his mouth over hers.

  Her hands automatically flew up to shove him away and as they met the cloth over his chest it was all she could do to suppress the instinctive urge to push, and push hard. She curled her fingers into the fabric to keep herself from doing so and managed to stand docilely. But this venture had failure written all over it because docile was all she could pull off. She simply wasn’t a good enough actress to pretend she enjoyed this slob’s attentions.

  Her brain was still rapidly looking for a way out that didn’t include her and Finn being gunned down or captured, when Frederico wrapped his hands around her hips and lifted her onto the trunk of the car. Then he slid his meaty paws up her waist, her diaphragm, clearly aiming for her breasts.

  Oh, no. That is so not gonna happen!

  Luckily, before she could blow everything, Finn materialized behind the cartel thug. She watched as he raised the gun he held by its barrel and brought the pistol grip down hard against Frederico’s head. The crack as it made contact sounded like thunder to her overstimulated senses.

  Then Frederico’s dead weight came down on her like a felled tree. It was far too late to dodge out of his way and feeling his slack heaviness picking up velocity as it tipped her upper body backward, she feared his overmuscled mass would slam her head right through the rear window.

  But Finn caught the cartel enforcer by the back of his collar and belt and hauled him upright, holding him in place long enough to move between her and Frederico and shove a shoulder into the thug’s gut to carry him in a firemen’s lift.

  “Move,” he said in a low rough voice and stepped out of her way.

  She moved, sliding off the trunk with alacrity to follow him.

  In a few long-legged strides he was at the back of the SUV, reaching for its cargo release with his free hand. It clicked open and he took a large step back to allow the hatch to rise. He looked over at her.

  For a second she could have sworn she saw fury etched on his face. But that didn’t make sense. And since he merely said in a neutral voice, “See if you can find the latch to pop the hood,” she decided she must have misunderstood. He bundled Frederico handily into the cargo space.

  She picked up her tote, then hurried to open the driver’s door on the SUV. It took her what felt like forever to locate the hood latch, but finally she released it, then quickly eased the door closed to kill the light. She turned...and literally bounced off Finn’s chest as he strode toward the hood.

  He caught her by the upper arms and steadied her, then set her aside. “We have to get the hell out of here,” he said. “Joaquin’s gonna be out any minute.”

  “Did you disable the car?”

  “I slashed a couple tires, but I’m going to grab the distributor cap and cut the radiator hose as well.”

  “I thought having possession of these babies might help slow him down, too.” She dangled the keys she’d found in a section of the console between the front seats.

  For just a second he stared at them as if hypnotized. “Damn. If I knew the keys were in the car, we’d have taken this rig instead of the rental.” But he apparently shook off the regret that sounded in his voice with a brisk roll of his shoulders and leaned into the engine compartment.

  In practically the same movement he straightened back up, a car part hanging from his fist. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They dived into the car and Finn had just fired it up and put it in gear when Senora Guerrero’s front door opened with a crash. Joaquin stormed out, his gun swinging around to take aim at them.

  “Duck!” Finn snapped, then leaned over the steering wheel himself to provide a smaller target.

  She bent below the window just as he stomped on the gas. She heard the report of a gun, but not the sound of the bullet hitting anything. A nervous laugh escaped her and she slowly sat up as Finn shot out of range between the few buildings that constituted the village center. “He missed. Oh, thank God. He missed, Finn!”

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Darkness, not lightened appreciably by the thick blanket of stars, enclosed the countryside as they left the meager lights of the township in their rearview mirror.

  She blinked...and realized her mouth was opening and closing like a trout’s. She snapped it shut, only to open it again and croak in genuine bewilderment, “What?”

  “With Mister Handsy—what the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Excuse me?” She hauled herself upright in her seat and swung to face him, outrage muscling aside the icy terror that the past several minutes had wrapped around the scant dregs of her courage. “You asked me to distract him, to put myself in danger—then believe you have the right to critique the way I handled it?” She glared at him. “What did you think was going to happen? That I’d pull out a deck of cards and challenge him to a game of Go Fish?”

  He took his attention off the road to pin her with cold eyes. “I didn’t think you’d invite him to stargaze, then suck off your finger like it was his di—”

  Rage such as she hadn’t felt since she was thirteen going on fourteen exploded in her brain, red-hot and out of control. Her usual fail-safes—not engaging, taking deep breaths, hell, taking a moment to prevent herself from acting before thinking—went up in smoke and she launched herself at him, fists swinging.

  “What the fu—?” He fought the car as it swerved across the dirt road.

  The vehicle’s wild rocking barely even registered as Mags landed blows in any undefended spot she could find. “You dare say that to me, you pimping son of a shit?” she demanded, further enraged when she became conscious of the tears welling in her eyes. With sheer determination she willed them away. Damned if she would let him see he’d made her cry. “That man had his filthy hands, his mouth on me and you dare accuse me of tacitly offering him a blow job?”

  She didn’t realize the car had rolled to a stop at the side of the road until Finn’s strong arms wrapped around her, pinning hers to her side.

  “Stop that,” he said in a rough, authoritative voice. “We don’t have time for this.”
But his arms tightened even more and one big hand roughly stroked her head, dislodging her head wrap. “I apologize, Magdalene. That was a crappy thing to say.”

  “It was an asshole thing to say. And my name is Mags.” Her nose was squashed against the hard plane of his chest, her back arched at an awkward angle and, all told...? “This has gotta be the worst stinking birthday of my life.” And just as she’d thought in the Santa Rosa cantina what felt like aeons rather than half a day ago, that was saying something.

  He jerked against her, further torturing her nose, and she could feel him tucking in his chin to look down at her.

  She wasn’t about to return his regard.

  “It’s your birthday?”

  Okay, maybe not technically, since it was after midnight. “Well, it was when I fell asleep,” she muttered sulkily. So, close enough.

  * * *

  “CLOSE ENOUGH,” Finn unknowingly echoed Mags’s thought as guilt piled upon guilt. God, hadn’t he just been a prince among men with her today? His mom would be so proud.

  But they needed to focus on the here and now, and he gently moved her back to her side of the front seat.

  “I really am sorry,” he said. “That was uncalled for and I have no excuse except that I’m tired, stressed out and pissed off, and I took it out on you. But as willing as I’d be to give you a couple of free shots at me, we’ll have to put that off. We gotta get the hell outta here and put as much distance between us and Joaquin as we can. For all we know, he and Mr. Handsy—”

  “Frederico.”

  “He and Frederico,” he amended, showing great restraint not spitting the name, “could be taking a villager’s car at gunpoint as we speak.”

  Fear flashed across her face, but she simply nodded and leaned her head back against the headrest. So he stomped the gas pedal to the floor and sent them roaring down the highway.

  He didn’t try to break the silence. He fully intended, in fact, not to say a word until Mags did. He sure as hell didn’t foresee that being a hardship—he was king when it came to keeping his own counsel.

  His brothers had long ago elected him the Kavanagh Construction go-to guy when it came to dealing with difficult clients, suppliers or hired help. He could be counted on to sit quietly and simply listen to a complaint or an excuse until he had its measure. Then he’d either fix it if Kavanagh’s was at fault, which on occasion turned out to be the case, or he’d set the other party straight if he disagreed with the client/vendor/employee’s assessment of the problem. And if a discussion didn’t supply the solution when he knew they were in the right, he was known for simply looking silently at the other person until they started squirming or blurting out all manner of things to fill the silence.

  He drove without saying a word for an additional forty-five minutes.

  Something about Mags, however, had a way of turning all his usual moves upside down. Apparently she didn’t mind silence any more than he did. And where yesterday he could have outwaited her indefinitely, this morning he found it amazingly difficult.

  “I’m playing with the idea of pulling off the road and letting Joaquin and company pass us,” he eventually heard himself say out of the blue. “Hell, we could go back to Senora Guerrero’s and get an actual night’s sleep, then find an alternate route in the morning. Because I sure wouldn’t object to being the trailer for a change instead of the trailed.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going back to sleep,” she murmured—apparently to the ceiling headliner, which had curled away in a few places to hang in ragged strips. God knew she’d barely looked at him directly since her blowup. “But there are risks to consider.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded, pleased she’d noticed when she’d spent most of the ride staring down at her fingers in her lap. “It’s surprisingly flat in this area and there aren’t a lot of places to hide a car.”

  “Sure, that’s one difficulty.” Turning her head without lifting it from the headrest, she looked past his nose and out the side window. “Then there’s the possibility that they might wait to fix the car. Because who the hell knows what runs through Joaquin’s head? He might have thought of the coming-back thing and decided to stay put.”

  “Are you kidding me? He’s too stupid to think of something that brilliant.”

  This time she did look at him...as if he should be committed.

  He snorted. “Fine, say what you want about me.” And after the way he’d dazzled her with his charm that would likely be an earful. “But trust me on this—it’d only be his unwillingness to trade down to one of the villagers’ cars, not any masterminding skills on his part that would keep him there.” He blew out a disgusted breath. “Which still leaves us in front of him.”

  “I have to admit, I like the idea of being behind better. It seems a lot easier to keep an eye on what’s ahead of us than constantly having to look over our shoulders.” She straightened suddenly. Looked at him without the distance that had veiled those blue eyes since he’d messed things up. “But if we do have to stay ahead of him,” she said slowly, “we need to maintain our lead. Or, better yet, shake him entirely.”

  “I’m all for that. You have an idea how to accomplish it?”

  She gave him a decisive nod. “It’s that finding-an-alternate-route thing you brought up. We’ve pretty much been following the Pan-American.”

  “It’s the best highway in South America.”

  “Yeah, by far. But it’s not the only one.” She gave him a level look. “I’d bet my professional makeup kit, though, that it’s the only one Joaquin has ever considered.”

  He felt a slow smile spread across his face and had to fight the urge to hook a hand around the back of her neck and plant a big kiss on her in sheer appreciation. Instead, he settled on saying, “You are brilliant!”

  “Yes, I am,” she agreed coolly and pulled the road map out of the glove box. She opened it in her lap.

  He knew damn well she couldn’t see a thing. But without missing a beat—or feeling the need to look up, apparently—she said, “Does that overhead light work?”

  “You didn’t test all the car’s features before leaving the rental agency?”

  She gave him a get-real grunt and he shook his head. She was clearly an in-the-moment woman and not big on planning, which as a carpenter, electrician and, hell, just an all-around builder, he didn’t understand at all. It irritated him. No, who was he kidding, it bugged the hell out of him. But that was his problem and, shaking off his exasperation, he tried the switch on the light above the rearview mirror. Reasonably bright illumination came on.

  “Eureka,” she said, raising the map and turning it toward the light. She pored over it quietly for a few moments, then set the still-open map in her lap and turned to him.

  “In what looks like fifteen or so miles after we rejoin the Pan-Am, the road to San Vito forks off to the east. The red line marking the roads is still fairly strong for that highway, but when we get to Cordoba and hang a right to head south again it’s not nearly as bold on the map. Which means it’s—” She shook her head. “Okay, I have no clue what condition we’ll find it in. But I bet it’ll be less than optimal. We might have to ask around about gas stations and such before we start down it.” She yawned hugely.

  “But that’s for tomorrow,” he said, reaching out and plucking the map from her hands and deftly folding it. “We’re finally getting back into the type of terrain I’ve mostly seen today. So whataya say we find a place where we can get the hell off this road and grab some sleep?”

  “Finally,” she muttered. “Something we can agree on.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  MAGS HADN’T BEEN camping since she was a kid. Well, strictly speaking she’d made camps with friends but had never actually gone camping with tents and sleeping bags and stuff. Mostly she’d run wild with the kids of the families her folks ministered to. And although the gritty urban streets of Tacna, where they’d lived until she was six or seven years old, were about as far from the wilderness as things g
ot, during the years that she and her parents had lived in the village of Onoato, the lush northern Amazon had been her playground. She and the village children had spent long carefree hours exploring and playacting. And building camps.

  She sneaked a peek at Finn while he set up their camp with economical proficiency. As he moved in and out of the shadows cast by a small battery-powered lantern, she watched his features change back and forth between the spare, angular beauty and hatchet-carved cheekbones of an old-time saint to a hollow-eyed, shadow-misted visage that she entertained herself by assigning more demonic labels to.

  She tried to picture him as part of those old simplistic childhood games, but she couldn’t quite manage it. She could, however, easily see him swinging on vines through the rain forest the way the older boys had done, and had a sneaking suspicion that if he had been part of her childhood gang, he’d have thought he was the boss of them.

  She muttered, “As if” under her breath.

  “You say something there, Goldilocks?”

  She started. Then, slapping back the bump of guilt over...darned if she knew what, she said, “Nooooo?”

  As if it were a question, for pity’s sake. Holy crappacino. She was so tired she was rummy.

  Finn strode up to her and, as if he’d read her thoughts, waved a hand at the small tent he’d set up. “It might be close quarters, but it’s out of the elements.” He gave her a wry smile, no doubt thinking the same thing she did: that it was dry and still amazingly warm given it was the middle of the night. He shrugged. “Such as they are.”

  Looking at the minuscule tent, she felt a moment’s qualm about those close quarters. But, lord, she’d give a bundle to lie down. So in the spirit of getting some rest, she sloughed off her misgivings.

  “I thought about setting up just the fly instead of the whole tent,” Finn said. “It’d be cooler and we’d definitely have more ventilation. But I don’t know what kind of critters are around here so I decided to err on the side of keeping them the hell out.” The night was alive with the sound of small rustling, chirping things. The crickets had gone dead silent when she and Finn first climbed out of the car, but it hadn’t taken long for them to grow accustomed to the humans in their midst and they were now back to their full nightly chorale.